CHAPTER SIX

Zahara's POV

I did not move, and neither did he. The hallway light stood between us like...something neither of us wanted to cross.

And for a long moment, the only sound heard was the low hum of the house settling around us...it was the kind of silence that made every second feel measured.

"You should be asleep," Armando said to me finally, his voice even. Though his eyes had not left my face.

"I heard something. A voice— and I thought someone might be hurt.” My lie came easier than I expected, smooth enough that I almost believed myself.  

"No one is hurt." He said quickly, exactly the way a man says something he has rehearsed for this kind of question.

"Go back to bed, Zahara."

I should have listened. Every instinct I had built over five years of hiding told me to nod, retreat behind my door and...let the matter die where it stood. 

But instead, I found myself studying the door behind him; the same heavy wood I had noticed on my first walk down this corridor...its handle worn smooth from a hand that opened it far more often than any forbidden room should be.

"Who is Yvonne," I asked him.

His whole body went still immediately— in a way that told me more than any answer he could have said.

The look on his face was not confusion. It was the look of a man who had just heard a name...that landed somewhere it was never meant to reach.

"Where did you hear that name," he said each word...Careful. Deliberate. Stripped of the calm he usually wore so easily.

My mother's name in his mouth felt like a hand closing around my throat.

I had not said it. I was certain I had not said it, which meant— it had come from somewhere inside that room, from whoever or whatever that lived behind a door I had been forbidden to touch.

"I did not, you just did." I said, my voice steadier than my pulse. 

Something shifted behind his eyes...Quick. Unreadable. Gone before I could name it. "It is nothing. A name from an old conversation. It has nothing to do with you."

"It is a strange thing to say nothing with that much weight behind it."

"Goodnight, Zahara." He turned before I could press further, his shoulders set in the same rigid line I remembered from the night we signed the contract...and he walked the length of the corridor without looking back once.

I stood there long after his door closed, with my heart refusing to slow, and my mind turning the coincidence over, from every angle and finding no comfortable place to set it down.

Yvonne was not a common name. It was my mother's name, spoken by a man who had no reason to know it— in a house built around a room he guarded like it held something worth more than the fortune stacked in every other corner of his empire.

I did not sleep that night. I lay awake staring at a ceiling I did not yet know the shape of, listening for any sound that might come from the east wing... But I heard nothing, just the ordinary stillness of an old house cooling after dark.

***

The next afternoon, curiosity won the argument my caution had been losing since the moment his door closed.

I told the housekeeper I wanted to explore the house...but I instead let my feet carry me back, toward the corridor I had been warned away from twice now.

A nurse sat outside the door this time...a woman in soft blue scrubs with a clipboard balanced on her knee, her posture too alert for someone simply passing time.

She looked up when my shadow crossed the hallway...her expression sliding instantly, into practiced neutrality.

"Can I help you with something, Mrs. Ivas."

The name did not just sit right in my chest, but I let it pass. "I was looking for the library and— I think I took a wrong turn."

"You did, the library is on the west side of the house. This wing is private." Her tone was, Polite. Professional. And utterly unwilling to invite further conversation.

I nodded and turned to leave, and that was when I heard it...Low. Clipped. Drifting from behind the door before it swung fully shut again after someone inside adjusted it.

"...the levels are climbing again. If this is the same poison from before...we are running out of time to reverse it."

I froze mid step, every nerve in my body straining toward that door. The nurse noticed my hesitation and rose from her chair— her expression sharpening into something closer to warning.

"Mrs. Ivas, this wing is private," she repeated, firmer this time. Positioning herself between me and the door as though she had done this exact thing before...for other people who had wandered too close.

"Of course. My apologies." I forced my voice into something calm...something that would not betray the way my thoughts were already racing ahead of me.

I walked away before she could see my hands shaking...my mind snagging on a single word that would not let go of me. Poison. 

Someone in that room was being poisoned...Slowly. Deliberately. And Armando had built an entire wing of secrecy around, protecting them from a truth even his own medical staff seemed afraid to speak above a whisper.

I thought of my mother's file back in that room, the name that had slipped from Armando's mouth like a wound he had not meant to reopen.

And a cold, creeping suspicion began working its way through everything I thought I understood about the man I had married. 

Whatever secret lived behind that door, was tangled with my mother's name, and I intended to find out exactly how.

I did not get the chance to think further before my phone buzzed against my hip...Sharp. Insistent. And Priya's name flashed across the screen for an hour, she never called without reason.

I answered it in the hallway— my back pressed against the cool plaster, bracing myself for whatever crisis waited on the other end.

"Zahara." Her voice came out...Thin. Rushed. Nothing like the steady calm she always kept for my sake. "I need you to stay calm."

"Priya, what happened?" I voiced with a joking tone trying to suppress my cracked voice.

"There was a man outside the building this morning, with a camera. He was not subtle about it. He got close enough to the twins that Edward noticed him before I could get them both inside."

My stomach dropped, the poison behind that locked door forgotten in an instant— replaced by a fear that reached straight for the only two people in the world I could not afford to lose.

"Did he get their faces?" I asked, my voice barely holding together now.

Priya hesitated, and in that hesitation I already had my answer.

"Zahara, I think he got everything.”